The formal sciences discover the philosophers' stone
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 25 (4):513-533 (1994)
| Abstract | The last fifty years have seen the creation of a number of new "formal" or "mathematical" sciences, or "sciences of complexity". Examples are operations research, theoretical computer science, information theory, descriptive statistics, mathematical ecology and control theory. Theorists of science have almost ignored them, despite the remarkable fact that (from the way the practitioners speak) they seem to have come upon the "philosophers' stone": a way of converting knowledge about the real world into certainty, merely by thinking. | |||||||||
| Keywords | formal sciences mathematics | |||||||||
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